Online advertising has become a primary source of revenue for a majority of media and publishing websites. As the importance of online advertising has increased, methods of online advertising have undergone a dramatic evolution. One of the trends of this ongoing evolution is for greater integration of advertisements into web pages.
Similar to other types of advertising, online advertising strives to present relevant advertisements to users in a manner that will capture the attention of the users. Many users are interested in the non-advertising content of a webpage and would prefer to ignore the advertisements. Accordingly, advertising effectiveness may be judged by a relevance of the advertisement to the interests of a user as well as the ability of the advertisement to capture the attention of the user.
Advertising may be largely separate from a main text of the webpage such as advertising in a banner or a sidebar. Advertisements relevant to the content of the webpage may be identified by comparing keywords from the webpage with keywords associated with the advertisement. However, with this method of advertising, it is relatively easy for the user to focus only on the non-advertising content and ignore the banner or sidebar advertisement because the advertisements are placed in the webpage separate from the non-advertising content.
A subsequent evolution of online advertising places advertisements inside the non-advertising content. For example, a word in a text field of the webpage may be a hyperlink to an advertisement. Clicking on the word or rolling over the word can lead to a pop-up advertisement. This model of advertising embeds the advertisements in the non-advertising content of a webpage. However, even though the advertising is associated with the non-advertising content of the webpage, the users may choose not to view the advertisement and the original text remains unchanged.
Accordingly, is desirable to find ways to deeply embed advertisements into non-advertising content in a way that is difficult for users to ignore and yet does not degrade the value of the non-advertising content.